George Rebane

– Government funded journalism
– NAACP’s racist relevance
– Taliban’s hidden murder campaign
– Hobbes’ Leviathan redux

In the 14jul10 WSJ ‘Journalism Needs Government Help’, Dr Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, argues for government funding of our fourth estate.  This would bring our already leftwing news dealers up to par with the similar state sponsored enterprises in the EU (e.g. BBC), China (Xinhua), and middle east (al Jazeera).  The argument goes that we have already demonstrated with PBS and NPR that our government doesn’t mess with editorial content (but they do seem to have problems with corporate sponsored content), therefore state subsidies should be expanded to cover all.  And the man seems dead serious here; there wasn’t a smiley face in the whole article.  Bollinger’s magnificent blind spot is highlighted by his apparent certainty that academe also remains a centrist American institution in spite of massive cash infusions from federal and state sources.

The NAACP has now declared the Tea Party movement (which includes the Tea Party Patriots of which I am a member) a racist enterprise that will prove to be malignant on America’s body politic.  In 1968 after Martin Luther King was assassinated, I joined the NAACP to protest that racist killing, and show solidarity with the efforts to grow a race neutral America.  Perhaps many of us whites did so, because its membership jumped after the assassination.  Then when the organization responded by becoming anti-white racist itself, most of us let our memberships lapse.  An opportunity was lost and the NAACP began struggling for relevance over the next decades as the world moved on, and goodly prospects for blacks bloomed across the land (albeit some with Sec 8 fertilizer).  Now it has played its desperate race card again to show that its true colors have not changed under generations of post-MLK leadership.

The Taliban continues in its persistent murder campaign against working Afghan women who sometimes are the only support of their families in that war-torn country.  They are being killed on a regular basis for going against warnings delivered to them in the form of surreptitious ‘night letters’.  You see, working might put the women in the proximity of men in a manner that is proscribed by that religion of peace.  The Taliban solution to all such infractions is death, carried out by their raghead assassins.  In concert with the administration’s policy to overlook/suppress any Islamic connections to worldwide incivility, the lame stream media predictably covers none of these atrocities.  Of course, our leftwing feminist organizations have had their mouths firmly duct-taped on such matters for years – women are only brutalized in western countries.

Time to add Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to our reading list.  Most of us have studied the Hobbesian duality of individual liberty leading to anarchy vs the impressed peace and order under a leviathan state.  The social philosophy of Hobbes, ‘the west’s first political scientist’, informed the deliberations of both our Founders and Karl Marx, one of the intellectual progenitors of the current administration.  Now the classic essay is available in a new edition “containing commentaries from scholars writing for general audiences” and edited by Ian Shapiro.  This volume would nicely complement your library of Bastiat’s The Law, von Mises’ Human Action, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and Friedman’s Free to Choose.

[update]  On the local scene, an RR reader emails me that the Nevada County’s 2009-2010 Grand Jury report seems to be stuck in some bureaucratic or procedural labyrinth.  They are about two weeks late while other counties have already released their grand jury reports and put them on their websites.  Perhaps others are also waiting for some of the important items that this report is supposed to address.  Our GJ website is here.